Black Teenage Memories, Under the Hamptons Sun

Although Colson Whitehead’s sea-breeze buoyant “Sag Harbor” seems like an autobiographical novel, its main character is not called Colson Whitehead. Perhaps that’s because Whitehead, in the context of “Sag Harbor,” sounds like a name no self-respecting author would make up. After all, this is a book about a black teenager so white-headed that he summers in the Hamptons, secretly likes the sound of Abba and works in the ice-cream-scooping trade.

Never mind the sprinkles and chips and marshmallows that heighten Benji Cooper’s descriptions of selling sweets to tourists. The Oreo is the dessert item that best captures this book’s teasingly self-aware spirit. In Mr. Whitehead’s time-capsule-precise 1985, Benji lives on a “Cosby Show” racial cusp between white bourgeois comforts and black roots. He and his brother, Reggie, spend their school days in Manhattan dressed so neatly in ties and blazers that they are sometimes mistaken for the sons of a diplomat or the young princes of an African country by some “senior partner in the law firm of Cracker, Cracker & Cracker.”

But in the summer they cut loose. They follow generations of their family out to the black communities on eastern Long Island, places first staked out by their grandparents. “We knew where our neighborhood began because that’s where the map ended,” Benji says of his Sag Harbor stomping grounds. “The black part of town was off in the margins.” North of the fashionable Atlantic beach towns but picturesquely situated on an inland bay, this turf is the ideal place for Benji and his friends to retrench, relax, mock one another and figure out what kind of people they want to be.

“Sag Harbor” isn’t about much more than the hilariously trifling intricacies of this self-discovery process. Credit Mr. Whitehead with this: He captures the fireflies of teenage summertime in a jar without pretending to have some larger purpose. “Sag Harbor” is not a book about that special summer when everything changed, when this boy became a man, when the scales fell from his eyes about adult life, or even about when he experienced the balmy joys of first love. Its plot is so evanescent that the removal of Benji’s braces counts as a milestone.

Photo

Colson WhiteheadCredit
Erin Patrice O’Brien

And its main source of wit is the intense self-scrutiny that Benji brings to every choice that might say something about his personal style. An extended riff about Stouffer’s frozen food ends with this dismissive swipe at the company’s macaroni and beef: “If Stouffer’s was royalty, this guy was the inbred dolt everyone feared ascending the throne.”

After the initial ecstasies that accompany each year’s arrival at Sag Harbor, Benji has some catching up to do. In terms of black slang and black culture his attendance at a mostly white private school means that “most of the year it was like I’d been blindfolded and thrown down a well, frankly.” So each reunion with a childhood Sag Harbor friend means a chance for Benji to study and analyze new affectations. Mr. Whitehead, whose previous novels include “The Intuitionist” and “John Henry Days,” describes this process so entertainingly that it becomes the book’s greatest asset. The embarrassed kid from Westchester (“Scarsdale ain’t nothing but a high-class shantytown”) and his flirtation with black militancy make fine fodder for Benji’s sharp-eyed observations. “It passed the time until business school,” Benji says of the new political activism of this friend.

What’s best about “Sag Harbor” is the utter and sometimes mortifying accuracy of its descriptive details. (His father’s only radio choices for the ride out to Sag Harbor were easy listening or angrily Afrocentric talk radio, Benji says. “Is there any wonder my dreams were troubled?”) And given the minefield of social and cultural choices that Benji and his friends must navigate, “Sag Harbor” has unusually good reason to dwell on minutiae. Even the smallest matter can carry baggage, as does the question of which of the Cooper brothers, left to fend for themselves during the week, will clean the family skillet after it is left unwashed long enough to produce maggots. “It wasn’t my pot, or Reggie’s pot,” thinks Benji. “It was society’s pot.” Mr. Whitehead’s observations are at their most incisive when Benji sweats the small stuff.

But there are times when this book overburdens its fragile conceits. Did it really need a lengthy exploration of the ice cream business, replete with the smell of Belgian waffle cones and culminating in horror-film visions of deliquescent, multiflavored goo? (Benji’s fondness for George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” and its notions of mall culture gone mad leads him toward this nightmarish overkill.) And must even a rain-soaked phone book or the sight of fizzing Coca-Cola (“How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff”) be placed under the writerly microscope?

Yet for all the book’s attention to trivia, Benji is somehow equally aware of the tiny nuances of teen culture and the immense pride and importance that his forebears attached to their conquest of Sag Harbor. It won’t be long until he himself will have to carry on that Sag Harbor tradition. As he regresses so convincingly to his formative years, Mr. Whitehead presents the book’s adults the way a 15-year-old might see them: as hard-working breadwinners whose burdens are lifted, in ways Benji can’t yet understand, with each trip to that summer place. When this book’s range encompasses kids, parents, community, tradition and history simultaneously, Mr. Whitehead’s recovered memories don’t seem so trivial after all.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Teenage Memories, Under the Hamptons Sun. Today's Paper|Subscribe